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Originally Posted by lrt's friend
We cannot be what we are not. There is a lot of history on how the Rideau Canal turned out the way it is. It goes back over 100 years now. The canal boundaries always were public space or were used for industry and railways that needed to be eliminated to get rid of the grime.
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"needed" is a value or political judgment that I don't necessarily take as self-evident.
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Ottawa industry developed initially from water power or there were steep hills or cliffs to the river edge. This is why we don't have beautiful lively waterfronts like you see in the pictures. The rivers were never the centre of retail commerce or housing.
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Well, except where they were. There used to be residential areas closer to the Rideau River which were eliminated partly in the name of flood control but mostly in the name of "beautification." The Rideau Falls area, the north end of Lowertown/Sussex Street area (before it got "Drived"), Lebreton, the river islands, downtown Hull, were the kinds of industrial and gritty neighbourhoods that have been transformed in other 19th-century-rooted Canadian and American cities; here, they have been obliterated and replaced with grass, windswept plains, pointless monuments, and other city-killing Radiant Garden City Beautiful Gréberized crap. The Whatever-The-Hell-It's-Called-This-Decade Parkway was built partly on top of, and partly in front of, a built-up (and transit-oriented!) urban environment that turned its face to the Ottawa River. Can't have that - riverfronts are for cars, dontcha know.
Ottawa used to have a much more lively social and economic interaction with its waterways, natural and artificial. Almost all of it has been obliterated, and almost all of the obliteration, either to facilitate the rapid movement of private automobiles, or in the name of dubious national interests, or both.
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And our harsh climate and poor navigation especially along the Ottawa River just would never have promoted it. And then there was the lumber trade that dominated the Ottawa River as well. So, how could we have possibly had a waterfront focused city?
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The same way, on a smaller scale, that Montreal and Brooklyn and Boston and Halifax and Vancouver did and do.
Check out old fire insurance plans or aerial photographs of Ottawa. The city used to be much more well-stitched to its waterways. Those stitches were all pulled out in the last century and replaced with endless swathes of city-killing grass.
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It will be very difficult to change this deeply ingrained history. The fact that we have cleaned away the waterfront industry is a huge improvement and the parklands are the envy of many cities, I am sure.
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No one comes to Ottawa to walk on grass, other than the geese. No one.
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If we want to have active waterfronts, we need to focus on one location.
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Why?
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I think we could have it a lot worse.
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That's true; there's always some Friends of the ____ group out there willing to take on the mantle of tearing down more city and replacing it with more frickin' grass.
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